The F Word

It took one woman decades to make peace with the taunt that defined her. Then she heard it come out of her own daughter's mouth.

"Ok," I said to my daughter as she bent over her afternoon bowl of Cinnamon Life. "What's going on with you and J.?" J. is the ringleader of a group of third-graders at her camp—a position Lucy herself occupied the previous summer. Now she's the one on the outs, and every day at snack time, she tells me all about it, while I offer up the unhelpful advice I've been doling out all summer long. Find other girls to sit with. Ignore them. Be yourself. Be patient. It does get better.

"Excuse me," I said, struggling for calm, knowing I was nowhere in calm's ZIP code. "What did you just say?"

From the way her eyes widened, I knew that she knew she'd done what her sister, four-year-old Phoebe, called a Big Bad. "She is fat," Lucy mumbled into her bowl.

"We are going upstairs," I said, my voice cold, my throat tight. "We are going to discuss this." And up we went, my blithe, honey-blonde daughter, leggy as a colt in cotton shorts and a gray T-shirt with Snoopy on the front, and her size-16-on-a-good-day mom.

I'd spent the nine years since her birth getting ready for this day, the day we'd have to have the conversation about this dreaded, stinging word. I had a well-honed, consoling speech at the ready. I knew exactly what to say to the girl on the receiving end of the taunts and the teasing, but in all of my imaginings, it never once occurred to me that my daughter would be the one who used the F word. Fat.

I am six years old, in first grade, and my father is hoisting—that's really the only word for it—me up into the backseat of the family's Chevy Suburban. "She's solid. She weighs 65 pounds," he's telling a friend. I have no idea why he brings it up, what it means, if 65 is a little or a lot. It is a number, two digits, out of context. It means nothing. My father's arms around me, the bristle of his beard against my cheek, the smell of his soap, the starch of his shirt—that means everything.

I am ten, watching my sister poke at her peas and nibble a forkful of meatloaf before pushing her plate away. "I'm all done." It's like watching a magic trick, and I don't get it. How do people do that, I wonder, cleaning my plate, wheedling for seconds, accepting, instead, a bowl of the dietetic Jell-O the well-meaning pediatrician had prescribed, a red goop that tastes like chemicals and shame. How can anyone say no to food? I'm beginning to recognize that there are people born with an "off" switch, people to whom food, even the most delicious, is simply fuel.

Then there are people like me, who eat every bite and still want more, who sneak into the kitchen when the house is dark for slices of white bread slathered with margarine, sprinkled with cinnamon and sugar. I have no off switch. Happy, sad, lonely, content—the one constant in my life is hunger. I will never be able to take food or leave it; instead, I'll take it, and then take more.

I'm 15, five-foot-six, 145 pounds, most of it breasts and muscle thanks to three-hour varsity crew-team workouts every day after school. My parents, in the process of separating, have shipped me off on a teen tour to Israel. The group is filled with a full complement of mean girls from my own high school and from a neighboring town, a wealthy Jewish suburb where Fiorucci jeans and Benetton tops are the order of the day, neither of which my parents would have bought me even if they had fit. There are five girls named Jennifer making their way across the Promised Land with my group that summer. "Oh, not the fat Jennifer," I hear one of my tour mates saying matter-of-factly to another as we hang out by our kibbutz swimming pool, holding his hands out a good foot away from his hips to indicate my girth, "the other one." So that is me: not the Jennifer who loves to read, or who listens to the Smiths and is the most sought-after babysitter in town. Not the Jennifer on the honor roll, the one who can swim a mile without stopping: the fat one.

I am incandescent with shame, knowing that fat is, by far, the worst thing you can be. Fat is lazy, fat is gross, fat is sloppy...and, worst of all, fat is forever. Michelle has a full-on Frida Kahlo moustache. Kim has terrible skin. But Michelle could wax and Kim could go on Accutane; I am going to be fat—and, hence, undesirable, unlovable, a walking joke—for the rest of my life.

I walk back to the dorm, eyes brimming with unshed tears, swearing that I'll stop eating bread, sweets, desserts, anything, to lose 10, no, 20, no, 25 pounds before school starts again. I'll wake up every morning and run five miles. I'll find a pair of Fiorucci jeans and an Esprit sweater-vest, and the mean girls like Michelle and Kim who hadn't invited me to their bat mitzvahs even though we'd been going to Hebrew school together twice a week for five years would be forced to acknowledge, due to the boys' appreciative glances, that I was one of them.

My resolve lasts until dinner that night: discs of fresh-baked pita, still warm from the oven; bowls of hummus topped with a slick of olive oil; chicken schnitzel, pounded thin and deep-fried. I gain 20 more pounds before I finish high school as one of four graduation speakers: the fat one.

Then I'm 18, sitting in the dining hall across from the crew coach. It's winter break, and everyone else has gone home except the rowers stuck here doing two-a-days, working out in the tanks that smell of chlorine and ancient sweat every morning, lifting and running every afternoon. I'd been a good rower in high school, good enough for Princeton to recruit me, but now I've gained the freshman 15, plus the 15 pounds one of my many bulimic classmates should have gained but didn't. (In the innocent days of 1987, I thought it was perfectly normal for brilliant girls with perfect SAT scores to have blue fingertips and a fine coat of downy blonde fur.) "If you want to stay on the team," the coach tells me gently, "you're going to have to lose a lot of weight."

I bow my head in wordless—and now familiar—devastation. No matter that I am strong or that I work hard. I have no off switch. I am bigger than the other girls, and that is what matters; that is all that matters. The coach relegates me to the worst boat and never makes eye contact with me again. The next year, I quit the team and join the school newspaper. I find my place, my calling. On the page, at least back in the glorious pre-Internet era, you're nothing but words and a byline. On the page, nobody can tell that you're fat.

I am 33, and after two days of unmedicated labor followed by an emergency C-section, the doctor places my newborn daughter in my arms. I am shaking with exhaustion, weepy with hormones. My midsection feels like it's been ripped open and scooped out, stitched together with burlap thread and knitting needles. I tuck the tiny bundle against my chest, unwrapping the blanket with trembling hands to sniff the intoxicating scent behind her ears, curled like the buds of flowers, and brush my lips against her cheek. First, I make the traditional new-mother inventory: ten perfect fingers, ten toes like pearls. Then I make a less-typical assessment, examining the shape of her body, the width of her baby hips, the creases of her adorably pudgy thighs. At eight pounds, 11 ounces, almost two weeks overdue, she's one of the biggest babies in the nursery. As I look at her roommates, some plump and adorable as the infants in diaper ads, others scrawny and jaundiced, I'm far too embarrassed to ask my doctor the only thing I want to know: Will she be normal, or will she be like me?

Now, at 42, I've made as much peace as a plus-size woman can make with her body. I might be big, but I'm plenty strong. I've run 5Ks and 10Ks, completed hundred-mile bike rides and triathlons. In my career, my weight has never held me back. I've worked for national newspapers, written best-selling novels, had a book turned into a movie, cowritten a TV show that made it on the air. I have a job I love, two smart, funny daughters, a rich, full life with wonderful friends, and a man who loves me...but I know that, when the world sees me, they don't see any of this. They see fat.

My daughter sat on her bed, and I sat beside her. "How would you feel if someone made fun of you for something that wasn't your fault?" I began.

"She could stop eating so much," Lucy mumbled, unwittingly mouthing the it's-just-that-simple advice a thousand doctors and well-meaning friends and relatives and weight-loss profiteers have given overweight women for years.

"It's not always that easy," I said. "Everyone's different in terms of how they treat food. You know how Phoebe is with ice cream? How sometimes she'll gobble it right up, and sometimes she'll let it sit there and melt?" Lucy managed a quavery smile, then looked at me, blue eyes wide, waiting for me to go on.

I opened my mouth, then closed it. How do I walk the line between the cold truth and helpful fiction, between way the world is and the way I wish it was? Should I tell her that, in insulting a woman's weight, she's joined the long, proud tradition of critics who go after any woman with whom they disagree by starting with "you're ugly" and ending with "no man would want you and there must be something wrong with any man who does"? Do I tell her I didn't cry when Gawker posted my picture and someone commented underneath it, "I'm sorry, but aren't chick-lit authors supposed to be pretty"?

Does she need to know, now, that life isn't fair, or can she have a few more years of thinking that it might be that way? I feel her eyes on me, waiting for an answer I don't have. Words are my tools. Stories are my job. It's possible she'll remember what I say forever, and I have no idea what to say.

So I tell her the only thing I can come up with that is unequivocally true. I say to my daughter, "I love you, and there is nothing you could ever do to make me not love you. But I'm disappointed in you right now. There are plenty of reasons for not liking someone. What she looks like isn't one of them."

Lucy nods solemnly, tears on her cheeks, the look of the Big Bad still on her face. "I won't say that again," she tells me, her voice shaky, and I pull her close, pressing my nose against the part in her hair, inhaling the scent that is hers alone.

We're both quiet, and I don't know if I said the right thing; I may never know. So as we sit there together, shoulder to shoulder, thigh to thigh, I pray for her to be smart. I pray for her to be strong. I pray for her to find friends, work she loves, a partner who adores her, and for the world not to beat out of her the things that make her who she is, for her life to be easy, and for her to have the strength to handle it when it's not. And still, always, I pray that she will never struggle as I've struggled, that weight will never be her cross to bear. She may not be able to use the word in our home, but I can use it in my head. I pray that she will never get fat.